10 Semis for a company with more than 1,400 trucks is just a beginning and, as always, if Tesla will prove the capabilities of Semi at a reasonable total cost of ownership, truck electrification should take off.

“Albertsons Companies plans to add 10 Tesla all-electric semi-trucks to its fleet to service Albertsons, Vons, and Pavilions stores in Southern California. The trucks will be able to travel 300 to upwards of 500 miles on a single charge, even with a fully loaded trailer, and use less than 2 kilowatt hours of energy per mile.”

“The electric semis expand Albertsons Companies’ commitment to running a safe, sustainable fleet to service its 2,300 stores across the country. As a partner and supporter of the Environmental Protection Agency’s SmartWay transportation program, the company actively promotes SmartWay certification to improve freight efficiency and environmental performance. The company’s entire 1,400+ truck fleet nationwide is SmartWay certified, as are 92 percent of trucks operated by third-party carriers.”

Tom Nartker, VP of Transportation said:

“Advancing supply chain efficiency and sustainability is an important goal for our company. We’re excited to pilot this expansion of our transportation program with trucks that help us limit our overall carbon footprint.”

You are talking about 5k-10k per year. The article states that reservations MAY have hit 1k. I’m thinking that the rate will be much lower until the truck is proven. If it works out as advertised for a competitive TCO, I’m thinking it will end up much higher.

Look in this forum: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/forums/semi.283/ It is the most managed community record outside of InsideEVs. DHL: 10 Bee’ah: 50 UPS: 125 Anheuser-Busch: 40 Ruan: 5 Wal-Mart: 15 JB Hunt: >1 Meijer Grocery: 4 “Leasing Company”: 50 Norwegian Postal: 1 FedEx: 20 Sysco: 50 Pepsi: 100 Albertsons: 10 Loblaws: 20 Ryder: That brings the announced total shy of 500. I happen to know of an order that did not make the tally, and I expect not everyone wants to advertise their orders, so 500 is a decent approximation. At $200k apiece, these reservations represent perhaps 1/10th to 1/15th of a single month of Tesla Model III sales presently. At 250,000 Class 8 semi sales per year in the US (best year in the last ten), 500 in preorders is not a meaningful percentage. I do expect the Tesla Semi sales to increase once they start producing them in quantity. However, Tesla will likely become a major customer of itself as well. Considering pre-orders are pay-in-full deposits at this point, Tesla probably doesn’t want any more orders until the truck is available. Meanwhile, Nikola Motors is bragging about colossal figures for a truck nobody has seen on the roads. There were supposed… Read more »

Makes perfect sense to order a handful of them. It’s enough to justify the added support infrastructure, but a tiny percentage of the fleet so as to minimize risk. If there are issues, they still have plenty of diesel trucks to run the routes.

Strange.
An article here at Inside EVs called”Tesla Q1 2018 Earnings Call Overload” stated that Tesla had received around 2000 reservations for the Semi.
Someone haveing a bad memory, or did i miss something this last 6 months?

Cut from the article;
Asked about Semi reservations and when it might be produced, Straubel said they were around 2,000 spoken for at the moment. Musk emphasized that they were actively selling that product at the moment and that companies were approaching them. Their focus is still on the Model 3 and becoming profitable, “it’s high time we became profitable.” He didn’t give any color on the timeline, however.

Some people have said that some of the reservations for the Tesla Semi Truck are not public info. If that’s a fact, and not mere speculation, then that might explain a rather large discrepancy between publicly announced reservations and the 2000 figure.

I wouldn’t rely too much on the year 2020 prediction for Semi Truck production. Not impossible, but Tesla doesn’t seem to be moving forward on setting up any charging or service network for the trucks, and at least a few of each will need to be in place when they start selling them. Furthermore, Tesla said it is going to make changes to the Semi Truck prototype in response to customer feedback, and we haven’t yet seen any near-production prototype.

So I wouldn’t be surprised to see production delayed until 2021 or 2022.

I don’t expect to see a widely dispersed public Megacharger network like the Supercharger network, but Tesla will want at least a few Megachargers in strategic locations to be able to show off the capabilities of its trucks. I expect most Megachargers will be privately owned and operated by the individual trucking fleets.